In the splash of the grasses

Running rest-day ...

... and I just can't resist another Norman Nicholson poem, this one about the very unusual Bee Orchid ...


Bee Orchid at Hodbarrow

A hundred years ago
The swash channel
Filled at high water
And swilled dry
In runnels of sand at low -
Under the lea
Of the limestone shore,
Mine-shaft and funnel,
And the old light-house
On its stack of rejected ore.

Fifty years ago
The new sea-wall
Cordon'd and claimed
A parish no one wanted,
A Jordan Valley without the Jordan,
Neither sea nor land,
Lower than low
Ebb-mark, arid
As wrack left lifted
High on the sand.

Only a backwash
Of rain drained inward
To a sumpy hollow
Above the old drifts -
Subsided tunnels
Open to the sky,
To rabbit and plover
Neither submarine
Nor dry-land level,
Neither under nor over.

But now on the bare
Pate of the ground
See the bee orchid -
Neither plant nor animal,
A metaphysical
Conceit of a flower -
Heading the queue there,
First come, first served,
Where even ragwort's rare.

Decoy queens,
Honeyed and furred,
Linger and cling
To each lolling lobe;
Nervous, green-veined,
Lilac sepals
Prick at the twitch
Of a pollinating wing.

And stiff as a quill
In the splash of the grasses,
The whole articulated
Body of the flower -
Bloom, stem and leaf -
Is tense with need
To breed, to seed,
To colonize the new-found,
New-sunk island,
To snatch the brief
Between-tide hour
Of this limestone summer,
Before the sea
Pours in again
In three or four
Hundred years' time.

---

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987)